Michael Spearman of Everything Everything

18 June 2013

Hi everyone, Michael Spearman here, writing from a hotel room in Bristol before a gig. Tomorrow we travel to the Isle Of Wight for the festival and after that straight to Denmark for Northside Festival. This is all with my band Everything Everything and I thought it would be good to do a little update on what we're up to at the moment.

It's starting to get really busy for us with Glastonbury, T In The Park and Benecassim all coming up in the near future but we're feeling good about how we're playing and feeling comfortable again performing without soundchecks.

There's quite a lot going on in our music so soundchecks are important to us but as long as I have the click track and a rough general mix then I'm happy to communicate tweaks to our monitor engineer as the set progresses. Once, in Ibiza, my in-ears broke and I had to get the click put through the wedge, which wasn't exactly ideal...

Since our album came out in January we've been on the road a lot. It's been brilliant, especially going to America, but I think we've all found we've had to take better care of ourselves so that we don't burn out. The obvious things: drinking less alcohol, eating better and doing exercise all helps. Even just walking round the city we're playing in is good.

Before we go onstage we all warm up in our different ways. I play a practice pad just to get used to the sticks in my hands and do some finger exercises along to whatever music is going on at the time in the dressing room. Above all else we want to have fun on stage so we hang out in the dressing room for half an hour before the gig to get into the right mindset together.

I'd like to mention a couple of drummers I've been really enjoying recently: Greg Saunier from Deerhoof and Zach Hill from Death Grips. Both have a sort of Tony Williams/Vinnie Colaiuta fire in their playing that I love. Recently I had the pleasure of chatting with the wonderful Leo Taylor (The Invisible, Grace Jones, Adele) about drums and drumming and we realised that Brian Blade was a shared favourite of ours so I'd always encourage anyone to check him out. My chat with Leo should be online soon so keep a look out for that as it was fantastic to talk to such a tasteful and humble musician about his craft.